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Frank B. Zindler's
The Jesus the Jews Never
Knew
American Atheist Press, 2004
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
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This fascinating survey of ostensible
Jewish sources of tradition regarding Jesus of Nazareth reminds us of the
pivotal role once played by Deist, Atheist, and Freethought skeptics in
starting the engine of the Higher Criticism. One would almost be
disappointed not to find frequent religion-bashing cracks and epithets in
Zindler’s pages, but they are there, and they are effective. That is, his
potshots inject a welcome note of levity into a massive and complex
scholarly analysis, and they should be no more off-putting to the reader
who congratulates himself for being neutral than are the conventional
pietisms of scholars who write from the standpoint of the Church.
Let none dismiss The Jesus the
Jews Never Knew as partisan apologetics, as if those who do not
believe in God must pursue a scorched-earth policy, erasing Jesus from the
page of history as they have already erased his Father from the page of
metaphysics. No, Zindler, in whose debt we already stand for his English
translations of works by Arthur Drews, is setting forth specimens of the
research and thinking that have led him to an admittedly radical position,
not trying to adjust inconvenient facts into conformity with a position
already held. Or at least that is how it reads to this reviewer.
A word about the point of the
work as a piece of Zindler’s larger project: I used to read (much more
rudimentary) accounts of the lack of Jewish evidence for Jesus and dismiss
them on the grounds that such arguments appeared to prove too much. If the
silence of Philo, Justus of Tiberias and (probably) Josephus implied there
was no Jesus for them to record or report, mustn’t that imply there was no
Christianity there, either? And that would, I supposed, be absurd. No one
would doubt the presence of Palestinian Jewish Christians available to
Josephus and the rest! Or would they? Zindler’s point is precisely that
such a Christianity in the Holy Land was indeed unknown because Christianity did not start there. It would
have begun in Alexandria or Antioch
(and other places as well, a phenomenon, like Mithraism, with several
roots). It would have reached Palestine (and Judaized) later. Pardon my
ignorance of a major component of the Christ-Myth theory. Now I get it.
Zindler has bitten off quite a
bit to chew. He has determined to make it through something of a dark
continent of obscure and turgid material, including the history of the
debate over the Testimonium Flavianum, the Mishnah, the Tosefta,
the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, and the Toledoth Jeschu in
its variations. It is necessarily slow going, but Zindler is a pleasant
and capable guide through the jungle. Nor does he fail to engage the
opinions of major scholars of each body of material.
The origin of The Jesus the
Jews Never Knew is manifold. First, Zindler was preparing a new
reprint edition of the Foote and Wheeler translation of one version of the
Toledoth Jeschu, weeding out some errors that had crept into
Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s 1982 booklet edition. But other questions had been
raised by the original publication, as when numerous Jews protested that
such a vicious Christian-baiting gospel satire could never have been the
(suicidal) work of Jews, any more than the fraudulent Protocols of the
Elders of Zion. It must rather be a hoax blamed on Jews in order to
incriminate them (in the same manner that one might well judge Spike Lee’s
film Do the Right Thing a propaganda reel for the Ku Klux Klan if
one didn’t know better). But this skepticism was ill-founded, and Zindler
needed to set the record straight. Plus, conservative Christian apologists
are now busy dusting off all manner of bad historical arguments amply
refuted and forgotten long enough ago that they sound brand new, so
Zindler figured he’d better enter the lists to set things straight as far
as one book can. The result is an introduction that grew and grew till it
dwarfed the original booklet it introduced.
In The Jesus the
Jews Never Knew, Zindler carries the debate on both Josephus and (for
good measure) Tacitus much farther along, making all apologetical appeal
to these interpolations no longer credible even to the wishful thinkers.
He combs through numerous Mishnaic and Talmudic texts which have often
been set forth as implicit or coded references to Jesus, showing in
virtually every case how the characters mentioned (e.g., Elijah’s disciple
Gehazi or the post-biblical Ben Stada) have nothing to do with Jesus, and
that only someone laboring under the assumption that the Rabbis must
have had something to say about Jesus could ever have thought they
did. In several cases, Zindler needs do no more than supply the immediate
context of the disputed passages to show either that they are obvious
interpolations or that they have been grossly misread outside of their
natural setting. In this, Zindler renders the same service performed for
us by various second-generation biblical feminists (like Kathleen Corley)
who have shown that supposed Rabbinical put-downs of women are nothing of
the sort, convenient as the old readings might have been for feminist
Christian apologetics.
One especially good example of
traditional over-interpretation concerns the passage j. Taanit 65b:
“R. Abahu said: ‘If a man say to thee, “I am God,” he is a liar; if [he
says, “I am] the son of man,” in the end people will laugh at him; if [he
says:] “I will go up to heaven,” he saith, but shall not perform it.’”
Mustn’t this be a reference to extravagant claims made by Jesus such as we
find in the Gospel of John? It would certainly seem so—until a look at the
context makes plain that it is rather a cumbersome play on Numbers 13:19:
“God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should
repent. Has he said, and he will not do it? Or has he spoken and will he
not fulfill it?” (And see Isaiah 14:13, “I will ascend to heaven.”) The
point may simply have been equivalent to 1 John 1:8 (“If we say we have no
sin, we are only deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”) plus
Matthew 11:23 (“And as for you, Caphar-Nahum, do you imagine you will be
exalted to heaven? Ha! You shall sink into Hades!”). The self-righteous
one would usurp God’s glory and will find himself shut out of heaven. What
we would seem to have here, then, on the part of Christians searching for
Jesus-references in Jewish sources is another case of what early Christian
scribes and sayings-transmitters did: taking a generic reference to human
beings, “the son of man,” and turning it into a Christological reference
to Jesus.
I found minor points where I
could pause to gag on a gnat. For instance, does Mark 12:32, where the
people esteem John the Baptist as a prophet, really imply that John was
understood to have lived long previous to Jesus? Just the opposite: it
seems to suppose the issue of the status of a popular martyr is still a
raw nerve, hence a recent matter. Similarly, does Mark 8:28 include John
among the ranks of the ancient prophets? No, the point is rather
that the crowd imagines the healer Mark knows as “Jesus” to be the
resurrected Baptizer. (On the other hand, Matthew 11:12//Luke 16:16
does seem to place John a generation or so before Jesus, just as
Robert Eisler argued.)
Zindler opens the door on an
intriguing mystery when he quotes Augustine as describing his beholding
headless Ethiopians with eyes in their chests, as well as Abyssinian
Cyclopes. Zindler has the text from Joseph Wheless, Forgery in
Christianity and Robert Taylor’s Diegesis. In the former, the
citation is of “Sermon 37,” while the latter credits “Sermon 33.” Zindler
admits he can find no such text in any printed edition of Augustine’s
works and infers it has been censored by ecclesiastical spin-doctors (p.
34), but I wonder if he is not rather unwittingly perpetuating a bit of
libelous Freethought apocrypha. Are the unbelievers pulling the same trick
with Augustine (to make him look like a blatant deceiver) that early
believers played when they interpolated Josephus?
Zindler points to certain little
known statements by various Church Fathers and scribes to the effect that
Jesus died in the reign of Claudius (p. 128 ff.), as well as Jewish
legends placing him a century earlier than the gospels do, in Alexander
Jannaeus’ era. Such data imply that the pinning down of the Jesus
character to a particular historical niche was haphazard and did not stem
from historical memory. A Jesus of unknown and contradictory date is
likely to be a mythical Jesus badly historicized.
I find myself not quite
convinced, with Zindler, that “Jesus ben Pandera” is not even supposed to
be Jesus. He’s got me persuaded that Ben Stada is more likely Simon Magus,
certainly not Jesus, and that Balaam is simply the Old Testament prophet,
not a cipher for Jesus, but the Pandera business is so early a piece of
anti-Christian lore that, when we find what sounds like the same thing in
somewhat later Jewish writings, it is likely we are dealing with the same
tradition. Even at that, the Jesus Pandera citations appear to be later
interpolations reflecting Christian virgin birth claims.
Previous delvers into
these matters took literally all the Rabbinic attributions of Talmudic and
Mishnaic sayings. Writing in the wake of Jacob Neusner’s pioneering work,
Zindler demonstrates what a genuinely higher-critical (source and
redactional) treatment of the texts reveal. For instance, it turns out
that Christian scholars had simply accepted very late statements of
pre-critical Rabbis that Ben Stada and Ben Pandera were the same, when now
it seems plain that the old scholars were simply trying to force some
economy on a mass of confusing traditions by harmonizing them. Likewise,
Zindler shows how traditional stories about Ben Stada, etc., were only
later made to refer to Jesus. “Jesus the Nazorean” appears only in very
late redactions of earlier texts which originally mentioned Jesus ben
Pandera or other characters entirely.
The discussion of the Toledoth
Jeschu (two versions of which appear as appendices) amply demonstrates
that, as an integrated literary work, it does not go back very early but
instead represents an oral tradition variously crystallized again and
again in many written forms. Zindler shows that, while certain motifs of
this gospel-parody go back very early, the later text versions with their
peculiarities stem from long after the entrance of Christianity into
Palestine and do not represent any native Jewish historical memory of
Jesus.
With this book as a foretaste, we
can only look forward eagerly to Zindler’s planned work on the origins of
Christianity, Inventing Jesus.
Copyright©2007 by
Robert M Price
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